The daughter of a Canadian mother and a French father of Algerian heritage, she spent her
childhood in Connecticut, Australia and Canada. After attending Yale University, she went to
graduate school at Cambridge University in Great Britain, where she met and later married James
Wood, now a critic for
The New Yorker. They and their two children live in Cambridge, Mass.

The angry narrator of Messud’s searing novel
The Woman Upstairs also lives in Cambridge, but her life has been far narrower. Nora, who
always wanted to be an artist, spent years caring for her dying mother and now teaches second
grade. She works intermittently on her art in her apartment.

Her life changes radically when a new student, Reza Shahid, enters her class. His Italian
mother, Sirena, is an artist on a grand scale, and his Lebanese father, Skandar, is a visiting
scholar. Nora, enchanted, becomes enmeshed with the family.

Messud will talk about the novel when she appears on Thursday in the Thurber House “Evenings
With Authors” series. She spoke recently with
The Dispatch.

Q: What was it like getting into Nora’s mind and her world every day?

A: The opening chapter, which is sort of a rant, came to me entire, all at once,
and then I had to figure out who was shouting in my ear. But I’m really fond of Nora, so I was
interested to spend time with her.

Q: One of the things that’s compelling about Nora is that she wants so much. What intrigued
you about her?

A: Well, everything, because I made her up! I got to choose what went into her
head. . . . I was interested in writing about the artistic gamble and what that means for women,
and I was interested in writing about somebody’s interior life, and how the life that we live
inside is different from the life that the world sees, and the whole question of desire, what’s
acceptable and what’s not — especially in the middle of your life, when you realize that you’re
probably not going to have everything that you wanted.

Q: This does seem to be a novel about middle age, doesn’t it?

A: It happens to people at such different times, and in such different ways.
The Divine Comedy is about middle age. But we do now live in a time when the culture is
more interested in youth.

Q: The novel plays with the idea of the outsider: The members of the Shahid family are
outsiders in the town, but Nora is desperate to get inside their circle, right?

A: That’s a lifelong interest of mine. We live in Cambridge, but on the
edge of Cambridge, right next to the Reservoir, and often, when I’m driving home, I think
how glad I am I’m on the edge. That, for me, is a comfortable place, and I think, possibly, for my
characters, too. I don’t even know what it
is to be an insider. I think there’s some question as to whether anybody in the world
actually feels like an insider.

Q: How much do you want readers to think about other works of literature when they read
this novel?

A: I’m always thinking about other works. I’m always in conversation in my head,
with other writers, so there are references in the book, but it’s not like you have to get them. If
it means something to you, it means something to you, and if it doesn’t, that’s fine. My hope is
that the book doesn’t need that.

Q: I love the descriptions of Sirena’s Wonderland installation in the art exhibit. Did you
find yourself making that up as you went along?

A: That was fun for me. When making up Sirena’s
Wonderland, I had to hope that it would be something people would plausibly include in an
exhibition — which wasn’t true for Nora’s art. I did a lot of research and reading and looking at
online archives and galleries, so I was making it up in the context of art that had had some
acclaim.